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Comparative etymology implies the root of this name is taran [thunder] and that Taranis should be ‘thunderer’. Although the figure bears no inscription, the statue of a bearded man holding a wheel in his lowered left hand and a thunderbolt in his raised right hand found at Le Châtelet in eastern France may indeed be Taranis. During Roman occupation Taranis became an epithet or cognomen of Jupiter, the Roman sky god (see pp. 38–9). EARTH AND WATER Like other polytheistic peoples, the Celts tended to perceive the spiritual (a view we call numinosity) in all parts of the accessible physical world.

Welsh collections appeared first, with William Earl’s Welsh Legends (1802) and William Howells’ Cambrian Superstitions (1831). Among the first Irish compilations was Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) by Thomas Crofton Croker, the son of a British officer. Dozens of volumes would follow through the end of the twentieth century, and the Irish Folklore Commission (founded 1935) has more than half a million pages of oral transcription, and 10,000 hours of audio recordings. Work in other cultures emerged almost concurrently: Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865) from Cornwall; François Marie Luzel, Chants populaire da la Basse-Bretagne, 2 vols (1868–74) from Brittany; and William Harrison, A Mona Miscellany (1869) from the Isle of Man.

The name of Ossian’s father, Fingal, was known across Europe by 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture was nicknamed the ‘Fingal’s Cave Overture’. The name of Ossian’s son Oscar became so popular in Germany and Scandinavia that it was eventually borne by a succession of Danish kings. Concurrent with and related to Macpherson came the so-called Celtic Revival in English literature, 1760–1800, led by such Anglo-Welsh writers as Thomas Gray, whose poem ‘The Bard’ (1757) helped make that word, known in both Welsh and Irish, idiomatic in English.